Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
P rincess Austyn Lunarelle of Osaria, I now pronounce you bound to a life of misery.
I had to be married by the end of the summer.
The clock was ticking. Literally. The one in my room ticked so loud, I often stuffed it beneath a pillow to shut it up.
Today, I'd left it on the mantel because the maid would only put it back anyway.
She had more control over her fate than me.
Fucked up? Yes. Though no one in Osaria was going to pity a princess of my position.
Sure, I was rich, I had access to anything I wanted at the click of my fingers, anything barring the one thing I actually desired anyway. Freedom.
Women had no power in my city. Princesses included. Unless you were Empress Magdor.
Tick, tick, tick.
My father would be announcing it to the entire kingdom of Osaria right about now.
The rules, the game. I was the prize. But he didn't see it like that. He was protecting me, or so he said. If there were rules, that meant men of lesser wealth would be eliminated. So princes, lords, and any other power-hungry, scheming piece of shit who decided to throw their hat into the ring could do so, as long as they could afford the entrance fee. What better way to assess a man’s suitability to be my husband than to get him to part with a small fortune?
But me? I didn't get to throw hats. I was the trophy, the glossy little token for whichever suitors greased my father's palm enough to enter the pageant - an ancient, barbaric and entirely sexist tradition.
Brawls designed to test the worth of their Affinities and brute strength would take place between the candidates as a means to eliminate them, and between the bouts I was supposed to entertain them with feasts and balls.
I was expected to dress up pretty and play my part as the shiny little trophy they were all working to seize.
But as the winner was determined by the fights, it seemed pointless for me to spend my time getting to know the competitors.
My opinion on them was clearly irrelevant to the outcome anyway, because when all was said and done, the victor of the final match would be declared the winner of my heart. My soul. My life.
You know what would really win my heart right about now? A glass of Cartlanna wine.
There was a magic to the trials, rumoured to have been put in place by a Prophet years ago when the first of my bloodline claimed the ruby throne, and the only way for a man outside of my family to seize full power of that throne was by winning it.
There had been two cases of arranged marriages where the reigning emperor had disregarded the tradition of the pageant, and both had ended with the bloody and horrifying deaths of the men who had thought to take the throne without passing the trials of the contest.
Male successors didn’t have to find their brides through the pageant though – their power was inherited and stayed within the bloodline.
Which was precisely why I believed the whole thing should be abandoned in favour of me taking on the role of empress when the time came.
If I were permitted to rule, then I could do so without having to take a husband or inciting the curse.
My father had once spoken of such a fate for me – of him changing the law which forbade me from taking the power myself, allowing me to claim my birth right and rule in his stead.
But the days of him speaking of such things were long gone.
I trailed around my opulent quarters, thinking of what was to come with a sharp pinching feeling in my chest. I thought I’d felt suffocated my entire life, but this?
This was real suffocation, a cloth held over my nose and mouth, my knees buckling as I was forced to bow to this fate.
I could scream, but no one would hear. I could fight, but my claws were cut.
I'm going to cut off my nose so the winner’s prize will be ruined.
I snatched a letter opener from the gilded mahogany desk by the window and held it to my face, the feel of the blade singing in my grip.
I gritted my teeth, picturing what those men would think if I did it, if I stole away their pretty prize, ruined it with slashes and tears and mutilated my face.
My fingers shook and I threw the letter opener back on the desk with a curse.
I was a coward. Or maybe I just knew in my heart that it would make no difference anyway.
It wasn’t just me they could win in this game, it was my father’s throne, and no mark I placed on myself would keep them from claiming me.
Not when there was so much else to gain too.
I wasn't allowed to go out in public without a hundred escorts and a veil over my head.
My beauty was famed, but not confirmed. The tales of my tiny button nose, unusually silver hair for my darker complexion, plump lips and eyes the colour of the rising sun was a complete exaggeration.
The wild stories that circled the city about how my gaze alone could light an undying fire in a man's soul was definitely going to be cause for disappointment when I met my husband-to-be. My hair though, that was the part that wasn’t an exaggeration.
I’d been born with silver hair that gleamed with a hint of magic long lost since the Fae of old. It looked like liquid moonlight and hung all the way down my back in rippling waves.
My father said it made me special and Magdor said it added to my value as a wife.
Men liked different, unique. But I didn’t want to be unique.
I was tired of being a pretty prize kept hidden away under a veil from the eyes of men, so that I’d be all the more idolised by the Fae who won me.
And I had to wonder what my fiancé would think when he realised his bride came served with a large helping of personality.
The men vying for my hand probably weren't counting on that.
They'd be too caught up in the power trip this could offer them and what my body would look like when their cock was buried inside me.
I shuddered.
I can't let this be my fate.
“Moping again!” Magdor crowed as she barged into the room unannounced. The empress. My father's wife. Did that give her the right to stalk into my quarters as she liked? No. But did she do it anyway? All. The. Time.
I despised Magdor, though my father had praised her name from the second she’d walked into the palace.
An exotic, beautiful Fae from who-knew-where seeking an audience with the emperor of Osaria himself?
Who would buy that? My father apparently.
The massive bag of jewels she’d carried with her had bought her an evening with him.
And the next day - the next fucking day - he’d announced their engagement.
I’d only been thirteen, but I’d seen her for what she was the second she’d arrived.
Dangerous. And every day since had only confirmed that to me.
From the moment she had walked into this palace, my father had slowly withdrawn from me, disappearing piece by piece until he was only the shell of the man I’d once known and loved.
My mother had died when I was young, and he’d been all I’d had in her wake.
He had loved me deeply, encouraged me in all things and treated me as his best friend.
And I’d had to witness him retreating from me as if we had never shared that bond.
Closing doors on me literally and metaphorically as he shut me out, leaving me alone in this big place with its endless corridors and echoes of a life I’d once adored.
I’d lost him almost as completely as I’d lost my mother, all because of her .
“ Gracious, what a face,” Magdor said, grimacing at me. “You're supposed to be the most beautiful woman in Osaria, and you constantly look like you've got camel dung on your upper lip. Whatever will your new husband think when he's presented with this morose bride?”
I wrinkled my nose, knowing I was only increasing the expression she so deeply hated.
This woman had made my life hell from the moment she’d gotten my father to marry her.
She was beautiful with her raven hair and dark eyes, her features seeming chiselled from bone, but beneath that beauty was a black, tarnished soul which I had tasted the wickedness of time and again.
From the second she’d gotten her claws into my father, she had inserted herself into my life, to punish me when she saw fit, to try and hone me into something I was never going to be.
Obedient. Compliant. A docile, inoffensive little woman. But fuck that. And fuck her.
I remembered the first time she’d caned my hands, whipping the backs of them while my wrists were bound in iron and the power of my blood was diminished so that I felt every strike all the harder.
When I told Father, he hadn’t believed me despite me showing him the marks.
That was when I’d first started suspecting that Magdor’s Affinities were of the manipulation variety.
Though I had never heard of such a power in our land, it was the only thing that made sense.
She had some deep kind of influence over my father which only I seemed to notice, and as much as it pained me to think of him being tainted by her nature, I couldn’t find a way to break through to him and confirm it.
“Oh well, perhaps it's not worth the bother of the wedding. My husband will only be disappointed,” I said icily.
She clucked her tongue. “Well, I could always look for a Prophet who may be able to break the magic of the formal pageant if you wish to simply marry my son.”